The Brood (1979) is a Canadian horrorfilm written and directed by David Cronenberg (often considered to be his first really good movie), centering around a psychotherapist, Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who has created a technique called psychoplasmics. By encouraging his patients to "go all the way through it", he is able to induce radical physical changes. A man verbally abused by his father develops welts all over his body. Another man's self-loathing induces lymphatic cancer. And a psychotic woman named Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) parthenogenetically gives birth to strange mutant children who act out her negative emotions. Then the therapist starts bringing all these negative emotions to the surface, and the children start killing anyone she sees as a personal enemy...

Cronenberg has condemned the censorship of the climactic scene, "trimmed" in the United Kingdom, in which Eggar's character gives birth to one of the monsters and starts tenderly licking it clean. "I had a long and loving close-up of Samantha licking the foetus... when the censors, those animals, cut it out, the result was that a lot of people thought she was eating her baby. That's much worse than I was suggesting."

In 2005, the full uncut version was made available on UK DVD. A remake was announced in 2009 with Breck Eisner as the director, but Eisner left the project the next year and the remake was shelved.

The Brood contains examples of:

Adult Fear: A child kidnapped by an ex-wife who believes that she should have custody is scary enough on its own.

Artistic License – Biology: The medical examiner who autopsies one of the broodlings claims its eyes have no retinas. An eye with no retina would be completely blind, not just colorblind as he claims.

Belly Buttonless: The broodlings have no navels, a feature which is pointed out during an autopsy as a sign they're not born in the normal way.

Mad Love / Manufacturing Victims: Not as in erotic or romantic love, but Mike, one of Raglan's patients, becomes addicted to the treatment when Raglan plays a surrogate of his father who gives Mike all the love his real father didn't give him. He constantly looks for someone to "be my daddy" when Raglan throws every patient of the institute out when he's dealing with Nola's ultimate breakdown. He even says that no one can play his daddy like Dr. Raglan, giving it a very creepy and disturbing pseudo-incestuous vibe.

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